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You can obviously select multiple objects on the Layers tab and drag them to another layer, but I can't find a 'Merge Layers' command as such.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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Merge is an operation associated with raster layers.

 

That seems to be the case in Affinity Designer, but it doesn't need to be! Suppose you've drawn a map with lakes on one layer and rivers on another: if we had a 'Merge Layers' command we could easily combine the contents of those two layers to create a 'Lakes & Rivers' layer, but as things stand we have to move all the objects from one layer to the other and then delete the empty layer.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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Thanks for the answers, everyone! Perhaps it might be clearer if I put my question into a context. I'm a long time Drawplus user (waves to Alfred - if it's the same Alfred in the Drawplus forums), I downloaded and installed AD for windows today (very excited). As a DP user the tools are very familiar and although the interface is a little different, it's pretty easy to get used to (more like PS which I also use).


 


So I was playing with AD just to see if I could get similar outcomes as I did in DP.  Where I got stuck was when I tried drawing a bunch of overlapping, black stroked but unfilled rectangles and I wanted to flood fill the overlaps in different colours. In DP you could do this in a number of ways, for example using the flood fill tool.  Here is the problem I ran into when I tried this in AD, As I drew the rectangles in Vector Personna, it created a new layer for each of them. So when I switched to Pixel Personna to carry out the flood fill of the overlapping areas, I found I couldn't put the rectangles on the same layer. Dragging and dropping them resulted in them being cropped to the top rectangle in the group (which I know is intentional). So I guess my question is how do I draw multiple overlapping rectangles and fill the overlaps in differing colours?


 


Rasterising the layers doesn't seem to help.


 


Many thanks! Still exploring!


 


Ravi

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Thanks Stephan, that worked. From a workflow point of view, I was just hoping to find a way to rasterise the rectangles and contiguously flood fill the overlaps which would be much faster. I can't believe that there isn't a way to do this! I'm positive I must be missing something.

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Thanks for the answers, everyone! Perhaps it might be clearer if I put my question into a context. I'm a long time Drawplus user (waves to Alfred - if it's the same Alfred in the Drawplus forums), I downloaded and installed AD for windows today (very excited). As a DP user the tools are very familiar and although the interface is a little different, it's pretty easy to get used to (more like PS which I also use).

 

I confess, Ravi: I'm "the same Alfred"! I knew that 'Ravi/ravells' was you, hence my reference to map-making. ;)

 

So I was playing with AD just to see if I could get similar outcomes as I did in DP.  Where I got stuck was when I tried drawing a bunch of overlapping, black stroked but unfilled rectangles and I wanted to flood fill the overlaps in different colours. In DP you could do this in a number of ways, for example using the flood fill tool.

 

AD doesn't yet have an equivalent to the Flood Tool that we finally got in the last ever version of DP, so it seems that 'Divide' (a nice command which is sadly missing from DP) is the way to go.

 

I found I couldn't put the rectangles on the same layer. Dragging and dropping them resulted in them being cropped to the top rectangle in the group (which I know is intentional).

 

It depends where you drop. If you have two overlapping objects and you drag the bottom one up on the Layers panel, dropping it when you see a long horizontal blue rectangle will cause it to be clipped to the upper object. Dropping it on the thumbnail of the upper object (when you'll see a short vertical blue rectangle) will cause the upper object to be cropped to the shape that you dropped on it. And, of course, if you drag up far enough you'll just change the stacking order.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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Hi Matt!!

 

Congratulations on your new 'baby'! I read your interview in Affinity magazine with much interest and am so happy that there is a lot more to come for AD.  It must be so much nicer for you making the software from the ground up rather than having to deal with legacy code! You must be getting out of bed with a spring in your step these days!!

And...THANK YOU for the trapezoid and segment quickshapes! I'm just about to hop over to the suggestions forum to suggest the ability to bevel corners (just to add your enormous to do list!).

 

All the best and Well Done to you and the team at Serif!

 

best

 

Ravs

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